Shakespeare did not write the plays ascribed to him. The Earl of Oxford did. And he was the bastard son of Elizabeth I, wrongly dubbed the Virgin Queen. Oxford asked Ben Johnson to pretend to be the author of his plays and, when he refused, gave the authorship to Shakespeare, a semi-literate jobbing actor at the Globe.

After the intensity of Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, we might have expected a more controversial study of Arab-Israeli history from Julian Schnabel than this sincere but plodding examination of four women whose lives are affected by the time and place they live in.

'I don't think I'd have liked her, had I met her,' says Lydia Leonard of Jackie Onassis, the character she's playing in Martin Sherman's play Onassis about the voracious and lusty appetites of Greek shipping's biggest player Aristotle Onassis, who married the ex Mrs John F Kennedy and had a doomed affair with the opera star Maria Callas. 'My sympathies lie entirely with Maria.'

The archive of the late theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, shortly to go on show at the British Library, casts interesting light on her friendship with the now Sir David Hare, a client and protégé 40 years her junior.